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Month: December 2017

Rainer Schuetze is the creator and maintainer of Visual D, the D plugin for Visual Studio. Recently, he implemented a new name mangling algorithm for the D frontend, which was released in DMD 2.077.0. In this post, he explains why it was needed and what it does.

One of the early design goals behind the D programming language was the ability to interface with C. To that end, it provides ABI compatibility, allows access to the C standard library, and makes use of the same object file formats and system linkers that C and C++ compilers use. Most built-in D types, even structs, are directly compatible with their C counterparts and can be passed freely to C functions, provided the functions have been declared in D with the appropriate linkage attribute. In many cases, one can copy a chunk of C code, paste it into a D module, and compile it with minimal adjustment. Conversely, appropriately declared D functions can be called from C.